A short but very prescient video. The challenges he presented are still with us, increasingly. Sea level rise is also a looming threat to coastal cities. Prof. Barnatt is a polymath and we should heed his wisdom.
Prof. Christopher Barnatt , I am really delighted to see your pioneering work about future cities and living and I hope many will join you in their efforts in finding solutions for the impending and imminent realities we are destined to face . Being an architect I realize what sort of responsibilities architects have . Ramamohan Nori , Architect
Hi George. Vertical farms would use either hydroponics or aeroponics to grow crops with no soil. The former is a highly established technique. The latter is very new, and sprays a mist of water and nutrients onto the roots of plants. Water savings can be up to 95 per cent.
Today you can work online, shop online, get online entertainment. In the future, the internet will have even stronger influence. For a lot of people it will become unnecessary to squeeze into an overcrowded city. In the future you can live in the countryside in a small town and still have all the amenities you are looking for.
This technology is already being tested. Fairly obviously it does not create power from nowhere. But, say, install it on the approaches to junctions and it can harvest some of the energy "lost" as vehicles brake (ie energy gets transferred to the hydraulic capture system as the car slows, rather than heating its breaking pads so much).
The thing about cities, is that 100+ years ago, citizens were still raising their own gardens, and keeping their own livestock in the yards behind their homes. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to go back to that.
Today everything can be manufactured if you have enough resources available. Financial, political, demand and physical things like raw materials and energy. Every imaginable plant can be grown and every imaginable product could be produced locally today. Importing stuff is cheaper now but once oil prices rise and global trade via sea diminishes it becomes profitable. Agricultural and industrial capacity is there, waiting for right moment.
What we need is a person that is given complete control over all of the earth's nations and is wholly incorruptible so that person can turn our civilization around, and then in 50 years or how ever long it takes the world is eventually converted into a full democracy with no less than 3 nations per continent excluding Australia and Antarctica. This person also needs to know many subjects and has experience in dealing with situations and can act on them accordingly and not be overly aggressive.
my friend and i were discussing this and because he wants to be an archetict and i want to be an engineer we made an entire city like this it was perfect
Some vertical farms are now being built in new "Smartcities" in China. Also, a former meet packing factory is currently beiing converted into a vertical farm called "The Plant" in Chicago. There are also plans for a vertical farm in Manchester, UK.
One of the solutions is to build the city on top of the traffic, covering up the noise and fume, walking downstairs to take the train or bus to go to work. No more car- loans, no more high interest rated mortgages because the affordable housing is built by a good government who really cares about the well being of it's people.The materials I have been using are the precast concrete double tees spanning 60'-0",or the $2,000 for one 40'-0" container ! George Wu, AIA 2012-5-13
We need to be careful how we frame phrases like "generate power". Keep in mind that a road which used vehicles driving over them as a source of power would of course be "taking power" rather than "generating" it. The reduced vehicle efficiency could not possibly be worth the return since there would be no net gain and almost certainly a new loss of power in the process. However, I am thankful to see such things being discussed. It's much better than arguing over which God will save humanity.
It's not a bad idea.. However for plants to grow you have to consider two essential things. Sunlight and irrigation. You're going to need some extensive hydroponics to supply everything below the hundredth floor. Also, how do you plan to harvest each floor?. I'm not saying it wouldn't work because it certainly could be made to work. I'm just staying that there are costs and logistics in this method of production that you've perhaps not considered.
Mr Barnatt, what do you anticipate the transition to the lifestyles you describe will be like? It seems that we will eventually need to employ the visions in your video if we want to continue our lives; alas, you'd think that fact would have compelled us to have already implemented them. Do you think we're pretty much at the peak of personal energy enjoyment?
Ah, but what you are missing is the increased yields per acre that could be gained from sealed hydroponic or aeroponic agriculture. According to Dickson Despommier (the real expert in this area), this can increase yields per acre by about 30 times. Also, above you are not accounting for the cost of transportation, food loss in storage and transit (c.10%), etc. Add these in, esp. with a 5-10x increase in oil prices, and things become more economic . . .
We're living in an environmentally conscious world now. We need to conserve as much land as possible because the bigger we stretch, the more pollution we generate, and we sacrifice more flora that contribute to the world's oxygen.
Vertical farms are just starting to be built. Checkout, for example, "The Plant" in Chicago, and the "Plantagon" in Sweden. I will be posting a vertical farms update here soon highlighting these developments and others in China and South Korea.
When I think vertical farming. I think a room with carefully controlled air and water circulation, filled with layers of plants and red and blue lights. The room looks pink thanks to the lighting. You would never know it is a farm from the outside. Looks like any other concrete building.
Would vertical farming be more efficient if the whole build was in the shape of a pyramid? Like say, the tallest tower is in the center, and it would support the ones around it, and those in turn would support the outside?
Ther are lots of companies working on this now -- checkout "The Plant" in Chicago (a working vertical farm), and in particular "The Plantagon", now being built in Sweden. And there's also an experimental vertical farm in Suwon in Korea. Here, as in the Plantagon, plants will rotate on trays to permit access.
2:30 - those plants impressive but too expensive in building, farming (without machines) and maintaining. The real solution for lack of food is to move into the oceans and sees - but they get more and more polluted.
@danielmorrisonrhymes My point is you cannot harness that energy with hydraulic plates. The energy you get from this kind of system comes from potential energy in the car. The car is at some height, then presses the plates down transferring that potential energy. The car then has expend energy to get out of the small hole it has just created by pushing the plate down. Piezoelectric elements could possibly do what you say.
There is a massive differerence between having a machine that can purify water, and being able to do this cost-effectively in quantity to clean water for agricultral and industrial purposes. And you still need the water in the first place -- and transporting water long distances is rarely practical. The world will not run out of water, but many localities will reach Peak Water by around 2025.
I watched this video again today and I though how big was the vertical farm that you described? Becasue London where there is a population of about 8M people would need 160 vertical farms if each can provide food for 50K people. Was it bigger than my proposition or smaller? Because if "my" tower could provide food for only 50K people then building 160 100 floor high buildings would not be very efficent.
the manpower costs those city farms would need are huge.. fresh vegetables are already becoming a luxury in some parts of the world.. there are many good farming lands around the world that are not used to their potential...
@siralucard19 That is an issue! In the vertical farm design shown the individual "pods" are spaced well apart, and mirrors on their lower half help to reflect light. Potentially in vertical farms low-power LED lighting may be used, or else fibre optic light direction technologies. Or we could grown algae or new GM crops that need less light. Some vertical growing systems today physically rotate trays of plants to allow them all to get enough light.
So is South Korea now, and China is building SkyCity One which will be a 200 storey building with an area dedicated to vertical farming. Japan is looking into investing in vertical farming technologies too.
@RHawkeyed The cars don't burn more fuel, the plates just use the energy the car expends on the roads when they drive over. I don't think if you installed all the roads with these it would generate energy to make it worthwhile, but it could be interesting to install in a busy intersection as a one off, just to make people more aware of the energy that we produce that we can capture.
@obamabinbiden911 Thanks for your comments. I accept that changes will have to be incremental. There is no reason we could not start to farm some food in existing cities.
Vertical farms would almost certainly use hydroponics or aeroponics (where water nutrients are sprayed onto the roots of plants) and no soil. Almost certainly new crop strains would need to be developed, possibly via GM or synthetic biology.
Interesting idea, and I like your ideas of intensive gardening. I am also a fan of vertical gardening, and I'd like to learn how to do it someday. You do have to wonder, if lands are aren't deforested for farms, are they still safe from other industrial ventures? Farmers generally care about the environment. Others appreciate permaculture. Just "food for thought."
Everybody needs to do their part. It's good to consume as little as possible and try not to leave much of a foot print. I figure that I'll soon spend most of my time in the Canadian Rockies if I'm so blessed as to be able to retire in seven years. None of that city stuff for me if I have a choice.
It always bothered me just a little bit that the marbles in the title frame go from rolling to stopped instantly, as that would imply infinite acceleration.
I have to believe with smart planning surface farming and around the cities could provide for the nutrition needed by the residents of the cities and surrounding areas. Sure the items presente on the plate will be different, but everyone would get the ration of beef and other nutrition they need to be healthy. These days much of the processed food transported into all markets exists to serve the profits of big corn and everything that grew up aside of big corn. Overall cities are too fragile and vulnerable when in the hand of inept and corrupt managers
You need a hell of a lot more than "smart planning". There's a gradual but steady trend to criminalize private gardening & food growing, ESPECIALLY in & around big cities. That's on account of corporate greed, lobbying & special interest groups, government corruption, a government war on self-sufficiency & self-reliance. The only way to deal with corruption & greed, is be completely destroying it & starting over from the ground up.
the things I think of when I think of a future city are these: upward expansion in the form of skyscrapers across the world. underground roadways to make room for skyscrapers. skyscraper farming... growing in the sky.
@RHawkeyed I don't think it takes energy from the cars. Just the mechanical energy and friction the car creates as it goes over the pavement. And it doesn't actually take whatever the car is running on. I mean the mechanical energy would just turn into heat, thats why things get hot when you rub them against eachother. However, I can't say for sure because I'm no pro.
Before WWII, North American tires were made of natural rubber grown in South America. The growing global population of automobiles, however, drove the price of the rubber up along with the tires and there was war and tire-rationing. At that point, a synthetic substitute for rubber for tires became marketable because natural rubber tires were simply no longer priceable within reach. The same will gradually happen with food, only it would be better if working urban systems are in place first.
is it possible to build a green house and i mean a house that has generators to store water for usage and power the house along with solar powered panels on the roof and a wind mill
I heard that where I live, The Wasatch Mountain Range that if we have another bad snow year we will have mandatory water restrictions so in some place like where I live its already Critical and by 2025 it will be even more so.
Hasn't their recently been a significant breakthrough in water purification by using Graphene to reduce the energy requirements of the distillation process?
That is because I uploaded a captions file with timings in, rather than letting UA-cam autotranslate it! I am talking more fluidly on more recent videos. :)
@lemsip It would indeed be more ecologically sound if most people did not live in cities, but they do, and that is unlikely to change near-term. So we need to work out how to make our **existing** cities more self-sufficient
@onewholearth Yes, indeed. And it is sad that we therefore don't try to transform our systems of agriculture when it may still be relatively easy to do so. In 20 years making the change will be far more painful.
I could see a lot of advantages to go this way: saving water and eliminsting the weight of soil in the high-rise structure Thanks very much for the informnation. There is a future to jave vertical farms. George Wu, AIA 2012-5-18
What makes you think that you need a whole story to grow plants? You can fit 5 or more plants per story. So a 1 acre times 100 stories times 5 plant racks per story would be the same as 500 acres. Also a city block is about 2.50 acres. So 2.5x100x5=1250 acres worth of growth, 2 main challenges are how do we run the lights, and small harvesters that can pollinate as well. Also I hope we stop wasting so much heat and space by putting ET3 and lev. trains inside of buildings and have just one.
1/If the plant growing tower can produce food for 50,000 people. Fine.But transporting the food to the consumers needs trucks to ditribute,not as convenient as the farm is next door to the apartment on the same floor as I have planned. Therefore, each dweller would have a farm on his floor. 2/The space over the roadways have been vacant since the day the roads and railroads were built. Now build the housing over them so the fume,vibration and the noise will be cover over.George Wu, AIA 2012-6-10
Vertical farms are just starting to be built -- checkout "The Plant" in Chicago, and the "Plantagon" in Sweden. I will be posting a verical farm update video here soon on these developments, plus others in China and South Korea.
@ipandah Look at it this way, the hydraulic plates will work by being pressed down. When pressed down there is a hole. Cars use more energy driving on roads with holes. It really is that simple. As I mentioned piezoelectric elements could possibly harvest some of the vibration energy, but is not likely to become very cost effective.
yes, terraces, or hydroponic tubes mounted horizontally on angled frames would be much more efficient than flat. the building it's in could have a vertical wall, light gets in anyway.
What actually tells you that? Have you done a feasibility study? Actually Asia is already implementing vertical farming. It just hasn't reached critical mass yet whereby most of cities food is acquired through these means. Right now skyscapers in most big cities do nothing more than collect rent from whatever resident or corporation houses them. At least having hydroponics or vertical greenhouses would make skyscrapers productive not to mention necessary and an integral part of city living.
“For each calorie we consume we need 10 calories of energy” How many calories do we need to build the huge building required to grow our foodstuffs? We must manufacture the different parts of a huge building which must be tranported to a building site in a city; once there it'll have to be assembled until you have the whole building constructed. Are you sure that our food grown in these buildings will be cheaper than the food grown in the countryside? I doubt it.
1/ Because growing plants in a tower is possible, I designed a farm for each family in the 54 floors of 4 towers with 4 skybridges connecting them, there would not be necessary for people jumping out of the windows like the World Trade Center in 2001. 2/ Great Wall Village is built over the railroads and Highways from city to city, all over the world. people do not have to down payment a car to go to work any more.It is Corbusier's great idea, not mine. George Wu, AIA 2012-6-4
I don't see lack of land all that much of a problem. Traveling around India known for overpopulation I saw vast stretches of unused land, sure the cities were crowded but out in the country there is plenty of land going on for miles and miles empty and unused, same for America there is much of the country were there's very little, same with Australia. I assume there are many many more places like this, so sure cities get cramped but I don't see a need to put farms on buildings when there's land
We'll also need to reshape cities because most people seem to dislike living in cities and would prefer to live in suburbs or rural communities instead.
it may come to pass that hooking the outlet tube of our freezers to a tank would be good sense. when it defrosts water, nearly pure, would flow into the tank, it wouldn't be too hard to make -just- a refrigerator based water collector, and there are non-electric, non propane refrigerators. black tubes mounted vertically in the sun, connected to white ones going to the shaded area of a house would cool, suck a straw, it cools, same idea. anything much cooler than the air will collect water.
I like your video, but... "hydraulic plates in road surfaces that would generate power as vehicles drive over them" Wouldn't that just take energy from the cars so they would need to burn more fuel? It seems like a bad idea, at least with the cars we have today, maybe with future solar powered cars?
@RHawkeyed Yes, I do see your point -- the energy has to come from somewhere. However, both energy-generating paving slabs and roads with energy-generating hydraulic plates are both in testing at the present time -- I didn't make them up! :-)
@eudaemonian Vertical / indoor farming technologies may hypothetically be used to grow most kinds of plants. Not least the new kind of LEDs that emit light only at the spectrum required by plants are a very promising low-energy technology that may help to grow plants indoors (and are indeed already on the market) . . .
well, the 5000€/kilo strawberries that could be harvested would hardly find consumers i think. Vertical farms are a nice concept, but way too cost intensive. They should start small and cheap: Use abandonned structures as gardens, rooftops; public and private urban land needs to be used for hobby farmers (meteor man anyone?) in the streets. This needs to be more than one high tech building. Plants cool facades, produce food and regrowing firing material.
Brilliant video!! i noticed it featured the bulidings in nottingham i was kind of shocked to see them and rather awestruck , helium 4 from the moon i reckon we ought'a extract
Pt 2. Just one large several mile wide building that can be more structurally sound and is cheaper to insulate and is better at using space. lets say it is 50 stories tall and 2500(50x50) at the base. This would mean that it has 125000 sq acres of space in an area that is only 2500.
A short but very prescient video. The challenges he presented are still with us, increasingly. Sea level rise is also a looming threat to coastal cities.
Prof. Barnatt is a polymath and we should heed his wisdom.
You are very kind.
This is amazing, not only are you producing food, recycle water, but your also creating jobs and cleaner energy amazing!
Prof. Christopher Barnatt , I am really delighted to see your pioneering work about future cities and living and I hope many will join you in their efforts in finding solutions for the impending and imminent realities we are destined to face . Being an architect I realize what sort of responsibilities architects have . Ramamohan Nori , Architect
Hi George. Vertical farms would use either hydroponics or aeroponics to grow crops with no soil. The former is a highly established technique. The latter is very new, and sprays a mist of water and nutrients onto the roots of plants. Water savings can be up to 95 per cent.
Today you can work online, shop online, get online entertainment. In the future, the internet will have even stronger influence. For a lot of people it will become unnecessary to squeeze into an overcrowded city. In the future you can live in the countryside in a small town and still have all the amenities you are looking for.
***** so true
This technology is already being tested. Fairly obviously it does not create power from nowhere. But, say, install it on the approaches to junctions and it can harvest some of the energy "lost" as vehicles brake (ie energy gets transferred to the hydraulic capture system as the car slows, rather than heating its breaking pads so much).
The thing about cities, is that 100+ years ago, citizens were still raising their own gardens, and keeping their own livestock in the yards behind their homes. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to go back to that.
Today everything can be manufactured if you have enough resources available. Financial, political, demand and physical things like raw materials and energy. Every imaginable plant can be grown and every imaginable product could be produced locally today. Importing stuff is cheaper now but once oil prices rise and global trade via sea diminishes it becomes profitable. Agricultural and industrial capacity is there, waiting for right moment.
I want to see this in my lifetime.
stay alive!
I don't know, except this is the first video i have ever seen on youtube where captions actually work.
What we need is a person that is given complete control over all of the earth's nations and is wholly incorruptible so that person can turn our civilization around, and then in 50 years or how ever long it takes the world is eventually converted into a full democracy with no less than 3 nations per continent excluding Australia and Antarctica. This person also needs to know many subjects and has experience in dealing with situations and can act on them accordingly and not be overly aggressive.
my friend and i were discussing this and because he wants to be an archetict and i want to be an engineer we made an entire city like this it was perfect
Some vertical farms are now being built in new "Smartcities" in China. Also, a former meet packing factory is currently beiing converted into a vertical farm called "The Plant" in Chicago. There are also plans for a vertical farm in Manchester, UK.
One of the solutions is to build the city on top of the traffic, covering up the noise and fume, walking downstairs to take the train or bus to go to work. No more car- loans, no more high interest rated mortgages because the affordable housing is built by a good government who really cares about the well being of it's people.The materials I have been using are the precast concrete double tees spanning 60'-0",or the $2,000 for one 40'-0" container ! George Wu, AIA 2012-5-13
We need to be careful how we frame phrases like "generate power". Keep in mind that a road which used vehicles driving over them as a source of power would of course be "taking power" rather than "generating" it. The reduced vehicle efficiency could not possibly be worth the return since there would be no net gain and almost certainly a new loss of power in the process. However, I am thankful to see such things being discussed. It's much better than arguing over which God will save humanity.
@Excelsoft Thanks for your positive feedback.The city shots were filmed in Nottingham.
Love the Nottingham element of this video
It's not a bad idea.. However for plants to grow you have to consider two essential things. Sunlight and irrigation. You're going to need some extensive hydroponics to supply everything below the hundredth floor. Also, how do you plan to harvest each floor?. I'm not saying it wouldn't work because it certainly could be made to work. I'm just staying that there are costs and logistics in this method of production that you've perhaps not considered.
Mr Barnatt, what do you anticipate the transition to the lifestyles you describe will be like? It seems that we will eventually need to employ the visions in your video if we want to continue our lives; alas, you'd think that fact would have compelled us to have already implemented them. Do you think we're pretty much at the peak of personal energy enjoyment?
Yes -- I think we very much are at the peak of "personal energy enjoyment" -- what a great phrase you have coined! :)
Do you think that homes could produce most of the needs we have? (fruits, vegetables, reclaimed water, etc.)
Whatever happen the basics needs must be keep as the most important part to be to threat in first otherwise it will the same as before
of course
Ah, but what you are missing is the increased yields per acre that could be gained from sealed hydroponic or aeroponic agriculture. According to Dickson Despommier (the real expert in this area), this can increase yields per acre by about 30 times. Also, above you are not accounting for the cost of transportation, food loss in storage and transit (c.10%), etc. Add these in, esp. with a 5-10x increase in oil prices, and things become more economic . . .
What is it called 2:09 ?? (the furtured farming)
We're living in an environmentally conscious world now. We need to conserve as much land as possible because the bigger we stretch, the more pollution we generate, and we sacrifice more flora that contribute to the world's oxygen.
Vertical farms are just starting to be built. Checkout, for example, "The Plant" in Chicago, and the "Plantagon" in Sweden. I will be posting a vertical farms update here soon highlighting these developments and others in China and South Korea.
When I think vertical farming. I think a room with carefully controlled air and water circulation, filled with layers of plants and red and blue lights. The room looks pink thanks to the lighting. You would never know it is a farm from the outside. Looks like any other concrete building.
I like that Vertical Farming idea. I think people like that eerie guy (in the video) better really plan seriously on building such architecture.
fantastic work professor! from which UK city are these photage?
Would vertical farming be more efficient if the whole build was in the shape of a pyramid? Like say, the tallest tower is in the center, and it would support the ones around it, and those in turn would support the outside?
Ther are lots of companies working on this now -- checkout "The Plant" in Chicago (a working vertical farm), and in particular "The Plantagon", now being built in Sweden. And there's also an experimental vertical farm in Suwon in Korea. Here, as in the Plantagon, plants will rotate on trays to permit access.
2:30 - those plants impressive but too expensive in building, farming (without machines) and maintaining. The real solution for lack of food is to move into the oceans and sees - but they get more and more polluted.
@danielmorrisonrhymes My point is you cannot harness that energy with hydraulic plates. The energy you get from this kind of system comes from potential energy in the car. The car is at some height, then presses the plates down transferring that potential energy. The car then has expend energy to get out of the small hole it has just created by pushing the plate down.
Piezoelectric elements could possibly do what you say.
There is a massive differerence between having a machine that can purify water, and being able to do this cost-effectively in quantity to clean water for agricultral and industrial purposes. And you still need the water in the first place -- and transporting water long distances is rarely practical. The world will not run out of water, but many localities will reach Peak Water by around 2025.
I watched this video again today and I though how big was the vertical farm that you described? Becasue London where there is a population of about 8M people would need 160 vertical farms if each can provide food for 50K people. Was it bigger than my proposition or smaller? Because if "my" tower could provide food for only 50K people then building 160 100 floor high buildings would not be very efficent.
Great seeing you here.
what would happen if Lake Mead in las vegas keep drying? water restriction is enough to solve that?
the manpower costs those city farms would need are huge.. fresh vegetables are already becoming a luxury in some parts of the world.. there are many good farming lands around the world that are not used to their potential...
@siralucard19 That is an issue! In the vertical farm design shown the individual "pods" are spaced well apart, and mirrors on their lower half help to reflect light. Potentially in vertical farms low-power LED lighting may be used, or else fibre optic light direction technologies. Or we could grown algae or new GM crops that need less light. Some vertical growing systems today physically rotate trays of plants to allow them all to get enough light.
I actually live in this city (Nottingham) and its getting pretty modern rather quickly
So is South Korea now, and China is building SkyCity One which will be a 200 storey building with an area dedicated to vertical farming. Japan is looking into investing in vertical farming technologies too.
@RHawkeyed The cars don't burn more fuel, the plates just use the energy the car expends on the roads when they drive over. I don't think if you installed all the roads with these it would generate energy to make it worthwhile, but it could be interesting to install in a busy intersection as a one off, just to make people more aware of the energy that we produce that we can capture.
some kinfd of International Chart of the Well being in the future will be welcome for each citizens
Having troubled seeing difference between the crops and the people in this future city
In the face of it, certainly an interesting concept.
@obamabinbiden911 Thanks for your comments. I accept that changes will have to be incremental. There is no reason we could not start to farm some food in existing cities.
Vertical farms would almost certainly use hydroponics or aeroponics (where water nutrients are sprayed onto the roots of plants) and no soil. Almost certainly new crop strains would need to be developed, possibly via GM or synthetic biology.
Interesting idea, and I like your ideas of intensive gardening. I am also a fan of vertical gardening, and I'd like to learn how to do it someday. You do have to wonder, if lands are aren't deforested for farms, are they still safe from other industrial ventures? Farmers generally care about the environment. Others appreciate permaculture. Just "food for thought."
Everybody needs to do their part.
It's good to consume as little as possible and try not
to leave much of a foot print.
I figure that I'll soon spend most of my time in the Canadian Rockies if
I'm so blessed as to be able to retire in seven years.
None of that city stuff for me if I have a choice.
It always bothered me just a little bit that the marbles in the title frame go from rolling to stopped instantly, as that would imply infinite acceleration.
Why not consider a vast national aqueduct system to route rain water from rainy regions to dry regions?
I have to believe with smart planning surface farming and around the cities could provide for the nutrition needed by the residents of the cities and surrounding areas. Sure the items presente on the plate will be different, but everyone would get the ration of beef and other nutrition they need to be healthy. These days much of the processed food transported into all markets exists to serve the profits of big corn and everything that grew up aside of big corn. Overall cities are too fragile and vulnerable when in the hand of inept and corrupt managers
You need a hell of a lot more than "smart planning". There's a gradual but steady trend to criminalize private gardening & food growing, ESPECIALLY in & around big cities. That's on account of corporate greed, lobbying & special interest groups, government corruption, a government war on self-sufficiency & self-reliance. The only way to deal with corruption & greed, is be completely destroying it & starting over from the ground up.
the things I think of when I think of a future city are these:
upward expansion in the form of skyscrapers across the world.
underground roadways to make room for skyscrapers.
skyscraper farming... growing in the sky.
I like the idea of breaking the link of food with fuel.
@RHawkeyed
I don't think it takes energy from the cars. Just the mechanical energy and friction the car creates as it goes over the pavement. And it doesn't actually take whatever the car is running on. I mean the mechanical energy would just turn into heat, thats why things get hot when you rub them against eachother. However, I can't say for sure because I'm no pro.
There have been many such recent breakthroughs. But they will not be enough to combat Peak Water I'm afraid unless we change our ways too.
that would be cool to see some of these come to life!
Before WWII, North American tires were made of natural rubber grown in South America. The growing global population of automobiles, however, drove the price of the rubber up along with the tires and there was war and tire-rationing. At that point, a synthetic substitute for rubber for tires became marketable because natural rubber tires were simply no longer priceable within reach.
The same will gradually happen with food, only it would be better if working urban systems are in place first.
is it possible to build a green house and i mean a house that has generators to store water for usage and power the house along with solar powered panels on the roof and a wind mill
I heard that where I live, The Wasatch Mountain Range that if we have another bad snow year we will have mandatory water restrictions so in some place like where I live its already Critical and by 2025 it will be even more so.
This all sounds great -- and a load of people working together could do it . . .
Hasn't their recently been a significant breakthrough in water purification by using Graphene to reduce the energy requirements of the distillation process?
That is because I uploaded a captions file with timings in, rather than letting UA-cam autotranslate it! I am talking more fluidly on more recent videos. :)
@lemsip It would indeed be more ecologically sound if most people did not live in cities, but they do, and that is unlikely to change near-term. So we need to work out how to make our **existing** cities more self-sufficient
Thoughtful and rich in content video, and an interesting website. Cheers!
@onewholearth Yes, indeed. And it is sad that we therefore don't try to transform our systems of agriculture when it may still be relatively easy to do so. In 20 years making the change will be far more painful.
I love these ideas by now we should already had them in place in cites.
Which software is used to make this video..?
I could see a lot of advantages to go this way: saving water and eliminsting the weight of soil in the high-rise structure Thanks very much for the informnation. There is a future to jave vertical farms. George Wu, AIA 2012-5-18
Hopefull mankind can work together to achieve this goal.
@ 03:21 That tram is going to Phoenix Park in Nottingham! I get that tram all the time!
This is brilliant stuff...it's a shame that we're not doing a lot of this already.
What makes you think that you need a whole story to grow plants? You can fit 5 or more plants per story. So a 1 acre times 100 stories times 5 plant racks per story would be the same as 500 acres. Also a city block is about 2.50 acres. So 2.5x100x5=1250 acres worth of growth, 2 main challenges are how do we run the lights, and small harvesters that can pollinate as well. Also I hope we stop wasting so much heat and space by putting ET3 and lev. trains inside of buildings and have just one.
Is that Nottingham University by any chance.
+Georgie Orman It is indeed. Lovethe rabbit icon! :)
1/If the plant growing tower can produce food for 50,000 people. Fine.But transporting the food to the consumers needs trucks to ditribute,not as convenient as the farm is next door to the apartment on the same floor as I have planned. Therefore, each dweller would have a farm on his floor. 2/The space over the roadways have been vacant since the day the roads and railroads were built. Now build the housing over them so the fume,vibration and the noise will be cover over.George Wu, AIA 2012-6-10
What's clean water. Never heard a water that is clean unless it has been add with some amount of flouride
Vertical farms are just starting to be built -- checkout "The Plant" in Chicago, and the "Plantagon" in Sweden. I will be posting a verical farm update video here soon on these developments, plus others in China and South Korea.
@ipandah Look at it this way, the hydraulic plates will work by being pressed down. When pressed down there is a hole. Cars use more energy driving on roads with holes. It really is that simple.
As I mentioned piezoelectric elements could possibly harvest some of the vibration energy, but is not likely to become very cost effective.
@ExplainingTheFuture also the method of producing electricity by walking people would promote a lot of exercise for people.
yes, terraces, or hydroponic tubes mounted horizontally on angled frames would be much more efficient than flat. the building it's in could have a vertical wall, light gets in anyway.
What actually tells you that? Have you done a feasibility study? Actually Asia is already implementing vertical farming. It just hasn't reached critical mass yet whereby most of cities food is acquired through these means. Right now skyscapers in most big cities do nothing more than collect rent from whatever resident or corporation houses them. At least having hydroponics or vertical greenhouses would make skyscrapers productive not to mention necessary and an integral part of city living.
“For each calorie we consume we need 10 calories of energy”
How many calories do we need to build the huge building required to grow our foodstuffs? We must manufacture the different parts of a huge building which must be tranported to a building site in a city; once there it'll have to be assembled until you have the whole building constructed. Are you sure that our food grown in these buildings will be cheaper than the food grown in the countryside? I doubt it.
his video might be about future but his intro is stuck way back in the past lol
XD
No soil ? How could that be? Please explain. It is interesting. George Wu, AIA 2012-5-15
1/ Because growing plants in a tower is possible, I designed a farm for each family in the 54 floors of 4 towers with 4 skybridges connecting them, there would not be necessary for people jumping out of the windows like the World Trade Center in 2001. 2/ Great Wall Village is built over the railroads and Highways from city to city, all over the world. people do not have to down payment a car to go to work any more.It is Corbusier's great idea, not mine. George Wu, AIA 2012-6-4
I don't see lack of land all that much of a problem. Traveling around India known for overpopulation I saw vast stretches of unused land, sure the cities were crowded but out in the country there is plenty of land going on for miles and miles empty and unused, same for America there is much of the country were there's very little, same with Australia. I assume there are many many more places like this, so sure cities get cramped but I don't see a need to put farms on buildings when there's land
We'll also need to reshape cities because most people seem to dislike living in cities and would prefer to live in suburbs or rural communities instead.
@ExplainingTheFuture
there is a you tube that explains it.
Its called innowattech alternative energy harvesting system
the thought of when you walk, you generate electricity, will promote a lot of exercise
it may come to pass that hooking the outlet tube of our freezers to a tank would be good sense. when it defrosts water, nearly pure, would flow into the tank, it wouldn't be too hard to make -just- a refrigerator based water collector, and there are non-electric, non propane refrigerators. black tubes mounted vertically in the sun, connected to white ones going to the shaded area of a house would cool, suck a straw, it cools, same idea. anything much cooler than the air will collect water.
June was the 2nd driest rain month ever only 0.01 inches of rain fell and the driest month, October 1958 no rain fell at all.
I like your video, but...
"hydraulic plates in road surfaces that would generate power as vehicles drive over them" Wouldn't that just take energy from the cars so they would need to burn more fuel? It seems like a bad idea, at least with the cars we have today, maybe with future solar powered cars?
@RHawkeyed Yes, I do see your point -- the energy has to come from somewhere. However, both energy-generating paving slabs and roads with energy-generating hydraulic plates are both in testing at the present time -- I didn't make them up! :-)
Nice to watch our future cities.
@eudaemonian Vertical / indoor farming technologies may hypothetically be used to grow most kinds of plants. Not least the new kind of LEDs that emit light only at the spectrum required by plants are a very promising low-energy technology that may help to grow plants indoors (and are indeed already on the market) . . .
Fantastic content as always!
well, the 5000€/kilo strawberries that could be harvested would hardly find consumers i think. Vertical farms are a nice concept, but way too cost intensive. They should start small and cheap: Use abandonned structures as gardens, rooftops; public and private urban land needs to be used for hobby farmers (meteor man anyone?) in the streets. This needs to be more than one high tech building. Plants cool facades, produce food and regrowing firing material.
Brilliant video!! i noticed it featured the bulidings in nottingham i was kind of shocked to see them and rather awestruck , helium 4 from the moon i reckon we ought'a extract
@ExplainingTheFuture
Its called innowattech alternative energy harvesting system
What do you mean by the future is in your hands?
Pt 2. Just one large several mile wide building that can be more structurally sound and is cheaper to insulate and is better at using space. lets say it is 50 stories tall and 2500(50x50) at the base. This would mean that it has 125000 sq acres of space in an area that is only 2500.